Art without Death

Film still from Richard Viktorov, Moscow-Cassiopea, 1974.

Anton Vidokle: When Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley (the curators of the Istanbul Design Biennial) told me the subject of the show—the question “Are We Human?”—I immediately thought of the writings of Nikolai Fedorov and other Russian Bio-Cosmists, and their ideas about the unfinished state of human evolution.

Cosmism is a little known intellectual and artistic movement that arose in Russia towards the end of the nineteenth century. At its base is a philosophy of immortality and material resurrection of every person who ever lived through technological means. Starting with Nikolai Fedorov, Russian Cosmists—whose ranks included numerous philosophers, novelists, poets, avant-garde artists, scientists, medical doctors, activists, revolutionaries, and many others—believed that the evolutionary development of humanity is far from complete, and that our main task is to evolve further, using our faculty of reason so as to become immortal ourselves and also to return all of our dead ancestors to life. Since the capacity of Earth to support this enormous resurrected and immortal population will be insufficient, Cosmists advocated the development of space travel, colonization of other planets, and human expansion throughout the Universe.

Bio-Cosmists advocated a complete reconstruction of society and human relations, as well as a metabolic reconstruction of our biological body in such a way that it can regenerate limbs and organs, exist without oxygen, derive energy directly from the sun like plants do, and also become androgynous or transsexual in the sense that the need for distinct genders and sexual reproduction would end once immortality and the resurrection of all previous generations became possible.

If this question “Are We Human?” was posed to Fedorov or any other cosmist, they would probably say no, because we have not yet perfected our design and have not overcome death.

Arseny Zhilyaev: Asking this question today is similar to asking the question of whether we still live under capitalism, or rather under something more horrible. In both cases, if we speak in nineteenth century terms it is possible to say: "No, we are not human in Fedorov's terms, and we don't live under capitalism as it was described by Marx." One popular argument is to define humans as inherently insane creatures who want to violently impose their identity and limitations onto the rest of universe, and thus claim it is better for us to find altogether non-human ways of thinking and operating. In other words, the argument insists that we try to avoid being human altogether. But in my mind, this is a really tricky claim, not to mention endeavor. There is an interesting case, again from the nineteenth century, involving Russian revolutionary activists from the People’s Will movement (Narodnaya Volya in Russian), the vast majority of whom came from affluent, aristocratic backgrounds and were extremely well educated, yet nevertheless wanted to act on behalf of peasants and workers. Leaders of the People’s Will advised their members "to go to the people" in order to promote revolutionary ideas of liberation, which meant to live and work as members of the ordinary, oppressed classes. Their attempts failed completely. Peasants didn’t trust them and ended up helping the police arrest them. It seems to me that when artists today try to give voice to oppressed plants or try to act as non-human agents, they are being as naïve as these activists of the nineteenth century.

I think that it is only within our nature as thinking animals, with all our limitations, that it is possible to reach what could be called “real will” and a universal voice. This doesn't mean that we should preserve human superstition, but rather the opposite: we should consciously plan to overcome the natural, social, sexual, and other limitations of our species. Fedorov was one of the first thinkers to advocate for this. For me, the main question here is who will take responsibility for this transition, for this permanent overcoming? To state intelligence services and corporations, we humans probably look like houseplants in need of cultivation and regulation. Because of this reality, I'd like to go back to Fedorov and develop more personal, or more properly human ways of speaking about our transformations.

For me one of the most intriguing questions for the contemporary artist who works with Russian Cosmism, or one who has an interest in reaching a non-human condition in art, is: Do you personally want to be immortal? Because for me, as a conscious event, death is one of the most crucial points of humanity. Can you personally imagine your artistic life without death or aging at all?

Anna Yakimova and Nikolai Kibalchich, members of the People's Will movement (Narodnaya Volya), in a bomb-making workshop at the Leningrad Museum of the Revolution, Leningrad. Photograph originally published in Vera Leykina, “A New Exhibition at the Leningrad Museum of the Revolution,” Soviet Museum no. 6, (1931).

AV: I was recently watching a TV program in which a five-year-old Chinese girl was able to put animals to sleep merely by talking to them. All sorts of animals: a rabbit, a lizard, different types of birds, cats, dogs, and so forth. It was absolutely mesmerizing to watch. I’ve heard about similar abilities that some shamans are supposed to have, but I have never seen this before. Perhaps it was just a TV trick, but in any case talking to plants or even speaking on behalf of unhappy plants may not be as futile as it seems. At least plants and animals won’t report you to the police!

But to answer your question: I think everything depends on what we mean by artistic life, how we imagine it. On the one hand, an image of a zombified artist painting crapstractions for all of eternity is rather tedious. Fedorov, however, had a much more complex conception of art than simply the production of aesthetic or conceptual objects. The kind of eschatology, the horizon of life he outlines in his writings, seems to suggest that the ultimate work of art is to work towards the spiritualization of inanimate matter: a kind of a vast, animistic project of teaching the matter that makes up the universe to perceive, to feel, to think. Fedorov believed that the most unusual and significant quality of human beings is our capacity to feel, to understand, to think and to be conscious, and that this capacity has to be shared with all the matter that does not already possess it. I am not sure where this desire to animate the world comes from, but its not entirely unique to Fedorov. There is a kind of a shamanistic sensibility to the entire geographical region from Japan to Scandinavia, and Russia is very much a part of that tradition. So Fedorov, despite being a devout Orthodox Christian, felt it was our evolutionary responsibility to teach the cosmos reason, and that precisely this activity is the real work of art. How long would a work like that take? Probably an eternity… So from that perspective, immortality becomes a necessity and we should begin working on it immediately.

I was reading something recently about the fact that there is a lot less difference between organic and inorganic matter than we tend to presume. Ultimately all matter, living or inert, is subject to the same cycle of organization and decay, even if the speed at which these processes occur is vastly different. In this sense planets, stars, galaxies—and arguably the entire universe—are not so different than our bodies. So maybe it’s not impossible to somehow learn from the longevity of stone while teaching it our ability to be conscious, self-aware, and intelligent.

I guess this all may sound a bit new age, but we have to keep in mind that we are speaking of a very different sensibility, one that comes forward at the end of the Russian Empire, continues through the communist revolution and a number of wars, and actually results in a manned space flight and all that. So this is not like having a pet rock and hallucinating on peyote; it’s a kind of a materialist delirium that is both ultra-rational and totally fantastical.

AZ: I agree with you about the role of humans in the universe and that it shouldn’t be overvalued. In Russian Cosmism, and especially in the ideas of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, there is a strong intuition of a radical materialistic unity of “thinking creatures” and matter itself. He wrote, for example, about an eternal liberation that starts at the moment of death, when the decomposition of our body releases atoms and molecules into the cosmos. He suggests that these liberated particles are overjoyed, ecstatic to be released, and that in this sense death is a joyous event. But at the same time, according to Tsiolkovsky, humans should ultimately be transformed into immaterial organisms capable of acting on a universal level. For me, the supreme position of our species is one of the problematic points in Fedorov's thought. On the one hand you can feel the misery of human beings with all their limits: weakness, aggression, pretense, naivety, incommensurability with universal processes, really pathetic things that need to be overcome… And on the other hand, Fedorov emphasizes the resurrection of human beings in their extant material forms, with all their flaws, weaknesses and ailments, while of course considering the potential for further transformations.

I once discussed the ideas of Russian cosmism and resurrection with an artist friend, who was really resistant to them. "Why should I like the idea of resurrecting my father?" he asked. "There is nothing good in resurrection for all. Sometimes death is better than being alive." Here is one more problem of Fedorov's vision: Should we resurrect criminals like Hitler, or people who were simply tired of life and who may not want to return? And after all, how should old fashioned people feel after meeting people from a much more advanced species, with immaterial or transformed bodies? Will those older humans be able to find purpose in their new resurrected lives?

AV: This is a really interesting point. Clearly we can imagine many problems in mixing the older resurrected generations and their later, more evolved peers. How would a medieval butcher from Venice, for example, react to a future generation of human who may be more plantlike, genderless, self-feeding and so forth…? I think one solution to this problem could be exactly what you recently suggested in Moscow—that various planets could be set up like period rooms in museums; there could be a planet populated by generations of people from the twelfth century, another planet for people from the early capitalist period, a stone age planet, and so forth… A population management system where people’s sensibilities are not invaded by sensibilities incomprehensible to them. The whole thing could be managed by artificial intelligence and everyone would be happy. Or it could be a total nightmare… When you described this type of organization, my initial thought was that we actually may already be living in this system now, and that the Earth is just one big period room within a universe-scale museum.

AZ: Yes, it’s possible to imagine an artificial intelligence in charge of universal life development, but why would it need humans? Maybe it’s much more interested in revitalizing stars with black holes instead. I see one possible answer being an artistic or museological vision; to assemble people within their epochs in totalizing installations that can cover entire planets in outer space. But not everyone wants to be an object in a museum. Boris Groys speaks about Russian Cosmism as a curatorial project.1 If you can't resurrect everyone at the same time, you will have to make choices, effectively forcing you to be a curator. I remember that once in discussion with you, Boris said that he is not against his own resurrection by future generations. But you have a more controversial relation to such a perspective, don't you?

AV: Sometimes I also run into a certain degree of rejection or even hostility to the idea of immortality, particularly from younger people. A few years ago I organized a lengthy seminar around Fedorov’s Common Task with an international group of young artists in Beirut. In private, many of the participants told me that in fact, they found the idea of living forever abhorrent. It seems that for them immortality meant suffering without end or at best infinite boredom. I was really surprised by this reaction. It was something I did not expect because personally, I have always perceived the idea of immortality as something very positive and desirable. At first I thought that maybe this was simply an age thing: when you are young, unless you are very ill, injured, live in a violent situation or have lost someone you loved, death seems to be a rather abstract concept; you read about it and see images of it, but its something that seems to only happen to others. It seems that the body does not really feel its own mortality until entropy starts setting in. On the other hand, as Boris Groys has written elsewhere here, since we can detect radiation from the birth of the universe, from the Big Bang, it is possible that there are signals approaching us from its future end.2 In this sense, maybe our bodies can already faintly register the energy from the death of the sun four and a half billion years from now. In any case, the death drive is incredibly strong in our psyche.

But maybe the more interesting side of this is not biological or psychological, but a certain insufficiency of imagination (which is particularly important because we are talking about artists—apparently the most imaginative part of society). It seems to me that most of us tend to sublimate our current life conditions and all its problems, tragedies and inequities, and project this into future scenarios. You can see this in many popular futuristic books and films: they most often stay on the level of the technological imaginary, while projecting the problems of our current society into the future. So while it’s easy to imagine and represent life in a society without money and with intergalactic travel, the plot invariably defaults to essentialist conflicts of power, heroism, betrayal, revenge, or something along these lines. I wonder what it would take to imagine things being really different. I suspect that most likely it would register as some type of madness. Actually, for all Fedorov’s pragmatism and religious orthodoxy, I do sense a certain mad quality in his thinking.

Film still from Richard Viktorov, Moscow-Cassiopea, 1974

AZ: I agree that we have a crucial point here for the interpretation of Fedorov's legacy. And your story about students who don’t accept immortality makes me think about the general fear of socialism. The majority of people associate this term with the Soviet project, or real socialism, and then mainly with its unification of everyday life, narrow political spectrum, unattractive cultural production, etc., that started with Stalin in the 1930s. But according to Marx or even Lenin, socialism as a goal is associated with something else—with opportunities of unlimited plurality and playful creativity, wider than those offered by capitalism.3 Now consider Fedorov’s concept of immortality, his idea of the universal museum producing eternal life and resurrection for all as the last necessary step for establishing social justice. What do we have in the twenty-first century? We have intelligence services and corporations that collect personal data to make money and perpetuate injustices. For some reason it seems that people associate immortality with real socialism, and capitalism with bright life and possible death, whereas really it’s more the other way around.

Another important thinker who appeared in this context is Fedor Dostoyevsky, who was strongly influenced by Nikolai Fedorov, and even wrote one of his most famous novels, The Brothers Karamazov, in order to test the Fedorovian notion of that ancestors have an inherent value in a world without God. In this book Dostoyevsky tried to depict the same situation that was problematic for the artist friend I mentioned earlier: "Why should I like the idea of resurrecting my father if he was not a good person?" In the novel the son kills his father after a discussion with his rational, atheistic brother. The father was a very bad, controversial, even criminal person. Dostoyevsky does not just depict possible conclusions to resurrection, but also identifies an unconditional love for our creator that doesn’t require any metaphysical guarantee or obligation. So resurrection itself is not a solution for Dostoyevsky. If we take one step back, I think that it can be a very fruitful task for contemporary artists to test the possible consequences of real immortality and resurrection in the contemporary art scene. What scenario could that lead to? The first thing that comes to my mind is that we can imagine the final transformation of famous artists into brands, like in fashion when brand names live on after the death of their eponym. We have that exact situation in the film industry today too, where it is more economically risky to try something new than to continue on with the same title or series. The popularity of TV or movie serials is comparable with the popularity of the novel in the nineteenth century (and actually Dostoyevsky, like a typical novelist of that time, often wrote his masterpieces for money as newspaper or journal serials). On the one hand, it is easy to imagine how most popular twentieth-century artists from the Top 100 list, according to auction price indexes, would be very effective as franchises. On the other, a dead artist's legacy is probably more profitable for a speculative market than the unstable, perpetually unfinished career of an immortal artist.

If we consider immortality and resurrection as additional pieces of a social order based on equality as Fedorov did, art and creativity will be transformed into the art of re-creation. Even the most radical Soviet Constructivists and Productivists thought that traditional artistic media would continue to exist in communist society, because traditional art is based on traumas and social contradictions (the inequality between rich and poor, gender, national identity, race, etc.), and that even after resolving all social contradictions, we would still have our bodies and their main properties, like sexual desire and death. In the case of the art of Russian Cosmism, we are almost beyond death and physical sexual desire. But then what would this society be? I guess its final goal would be to reconnect or redesign billions of independent pieces of previous lives into new constellations; a radical hybridity. This is a very Greenbergian notion: that the final goal of art is to give voice to yourself as a specific material or medium. When life is your artistic medium—from the Big Bang to immortality—there is enormous potential as an artist or curator. This would definitely raise new questions on old topics, like that of the spectator (how can we observe art pieces the size of the universe from within the same universe?) and institutional critique (how can we change the physical laws of artworks, determined as they are by the universe, themselves?) According to contemporary science, other universes, different from the one we inhabit, can exist. Our world that appeared with the Big Bang is only one possible constellation, and maybe we can access alternative ones via black holes. In the context of art, this gives enough distance to observe a universal art installation and to view it critically, while at the the same time opening space to reflect on the medium. In this respect, what do you think about contemporary artistic attempts to overcome physical or mental human limits? Do we need limits at all?

A diagram of Fedorov's Common Task of resurrection, by Nikolai Peterson, circa late nineteenth–early twentieth century

AV: I think artists are already at least potentially immortal. Similar to kings who are said to have both a physical body that can age, get sick and die, and a political one that is indestructible and is immortal (The King is Dead, Long Live the King!), artists probably also inhabit two different bodies. In this sense one could say that Duchamp or Dostoyevsky are as alive now as they ever have been, because their living presence in society extends beyond the death of their physical bodies. So in this way artistic process is always an attempt to overcome physical, mental or temporal limits; an attempt that most of the time does not succeed, but always has a potential to overcome death.

This is not exactly the kind of immortality that Fedorov had in mind. But I think this potential for immortal life through art is precisely one of the reasons art is so central to his thinking and why he refers to art so much in his writings, more than any other philosopher I know. Almost everything we know about the past is given to us through preserved artifacts: works of literature, poems, sculptures, drawings and paintings, decorative objects, architectural remnants, and so on. Inevitably this is what forms the contents of most museums. Fedorov's universal museum, where he thinks resurrection will take place, is simply a radicalized, expanded and more inclusive version of the museums we have now.

As you say, the closest thing we have to a universal museum—a museum that preserves everything—is the internet, which also doubles as an enormous data collector used for anything from commerce to government surveillance. From this perspective, immortality or resurrection made possible through a vast surveillance mechanism sounds sinister. But I also think oppressive structures, like intelligence and security agencies, often don’t really realize the long term ramifications of what they are doing. The CIA thought they were resisting the Soviet Union by funding religious schools in Afghanistan, but instead they helped to create militant Islamism that later turned around and attacked America. So the NSA may think that they are collecting data to fight terrorism or control a population, but at a later time it may turn out that they were actually building an elaborate museum archive that will be used to resurrect people.

The Mormon church also performs a vast information collection project. They have built a huge archive of personal records located deep inside a mountain in Utah with more than two billion names, birth dates, etc., because their religion suggest that they can baptize dead people and convert all who ever lived to Christianity for the return of Jesus. While I do not share their beliefs, it is kind of comforting that someone is gathering and preserving all this information. In this sense, it’s interesting that so many art institutions insist on listing dates of birth of artists next to their names. I always ask them to keep the birthday out, but there is usually a lot of pressure to include this information, which goes into all the printed matter and gets archived.

Recently I asked a friend who has done a lot of research on the history of exhibitions if he knew when the practice started, and as far as he could tell, it began with an important exhibition—the Sonderbund—of Modern Art in Cologne, Germany in 1912. In a way this makes sense, because generational acceleration in art is very much rooted in modernism, and at this stage every decade is expected to produce a new and different type of art. Of course this makes the duration of any one artistic project very short; it is difficult for me personally to imagine working on something for more than five or ten years at most. To some extent this must affect the degree of complexity of the projects people tend to undertake. I would be very curious to imagine what a work that requires several hundred years to make would be like, not merely in appearance but in conceptual scope. A historical precedent for something like this could be found in church architecture, which at a certain point required several generations to complete. Incidentally, church architecture is a model for a perfect, integrated artwork for Fedorov.

Arseny, if you had a few hundred years to dedicate to an art project, what would you do?

AZ: You know when you mentioned it, I felt like it is almost impossible for me to imagine such a long project as well. I consider my practice to focus on making experimental models that work to test possible political, aesthetic and historical scenarios by way of the viewer's experience. Each new project has its own visual and conceptual language; they are completely different from one another. Of course retrospectively you can draw a logical line between them, but it needs a particular, deeper optic than the average spectator has. As far as I know, Anton, your projects can be interpreted in a similar way. They have a straight conceptual frame or corpus that fix the field of possible artistic interventions, for better or worse. Maybe it is too conservative, but I would say that artists only work on one single artwork throughout their entire life.

But then I think that time is just the effect of the specificity of our universal setting. There is a new theory proposed by Australian scientist Joan Vaccaro that speculates about the origin of time. And according to her research, "T violation, or a violation of time reversal (T) symmetry, is forcing the universe and us in it, into the future."4 A universe without this violation should be symmetrical in space and time, which means absent of temporal flow, of coherence. In such a world, time can be used in the same manner as space; each thing can only be in one place and one time. If you impose this model on art history, you would achieve the historical avant-garde's demand for the radical independence of artwork from previous forms or even art history itself, a demand that consciously or unconsciously limits the production of even the most radical anti-narrative experiments. If scientists can make such models, why do we as artists limit our imagination to the historically known world of art?

Another answer to the same problem is the exact opposite of this: the decision to preserve all possible directions of time and its potential transformation of matter; all possible scenarios that our life and our world can have. This is what we have in case of Fedorov’s project of total preservation, or with regards to time as an important part of the artistic project, Roman Opałka's conceptual paintings, in which one gets the sense of a sublime feeling of monumentality in time, similar to that in space.

But I feel that there is a serious tension between existing in both a space and time that forces humanity to go onwards in its development, and the possibility that we could just get tired and give up. In this case even the short life of contemporary art projects can be too long. What do you prefer Anton: to have all the time in the universe to do everything, or to have a limited time to do nothing?

AV: I prefer art without death…

×

Superhumanity, a project by e-flux Architecture at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, is produced in cooperation with the Istanbul Design Biennial, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand, and the Ernst Schering Foundation.

Anton Vidokle is an editor of e-flux journal.

Arseny Zhilyaev is an artist based in Moscow and Venice. His projects examine the legacy of Soviet museology and the museum within the philosophy of Russian Cosmism.

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“A knower, whatever name one may want to call it, self experiencer, protagonist, needs to be generated in the brain if the mind is to become conscious. When the brain manages to introduce a knower in the mind, subjectivity follows.”
—Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind
Contemporary technological development tends to move towards...

Creative Destruction and Cybernetic History
I saw the future. It was empty.
A clean slate, flat, designed through and through.
In his 1963 film “How to Kill People” designer George Nelson argues that killing is a matter of design, next to fashion and homemaking. Nelson states that design is crucial in improving both the form and function of weapons. It deploys aesthetics to improve lethal technology.
An accelerated version of the design of killing recently went on trial...

My question is not “What is a human being?” but a smaller question, one that isn’t frequently asked but one that turns out to be important to understand the significance of the larger one. This question is this: do human beings always recognize other human beings as human beings? A special case of this would be: do human beings always recognize themselves as human beings? If they do, what are the means of recognition? One reason for asking the question is because of the way in which violence...

In the first three months of 2016, the number of wealthy Chinese couples hiring fertility and surrogacy gestation services at US-based clinics grew by 260%. 1 Many fertility clinics based in the United States admit that Chinese nationals already constituted 40% of their clientele. This surge was in part a rapid reaction to the end of China’s one-child reproductive policy. 2 Due to the effects of long-term exposure to environmental pollution, many surrogacies requires couples to receive...

There was a period shortly before the third end when a group of mechatronic engineers were incredibly productive. It didn’t last long, but we managed to build a new Copperland, brick by brick, from the basalt rocks formed by rapid cooling solar flares. Mechatronic Systems Science Programs created new devices for communication without cell phones that emit radiofrequencies. Our Incident Update Office transformed crime-prediction algorithms into crime-prevention algorithms and abolished all...

In 1986, during a flight over southwest Amazonia, the geographer Alceu Ranzi noticed a huge geometric earthwork cut through the middle of a vast tract of deforested land. From the ground, the structure was nearly imperceptible, as it mingled with the environment like a natural topographic feature, but from the vantage point of the aircraft, its precise architectural plan was clearly distinguishable as an engineered inscription on the surface of the earth. Ranzi recognized that the “geoglyph”...

If to err is human, to design corrective systems is all the more so. When in 1962 Ivan Sutherland designed the first drafting program that would allow us, amongst other things, to draw better circles, he was in many ways simply providing an update to Leon Battista Alberti’s circle-drawing system issued some five hundred years earlier in De Pictura . Crucially, in both, one does not have to be able to draw a circle to draw a circle . Sutherland, under Claude Shannon’s wily guidance,...

Over the past twelve months, two international initiatives have been closely watched because they appear to set the terms for a new, globally punishable, architectural criminality. The Italian-Jordanian initiative Protecting Cultural Heritage: An imperative for humanity mobilized the UN, Interpol, and UNESCO to stem the looting and smuggling of antiquities out of war-torn Syria by demonstrating that their traffic “finances terrorism” and is “linked to international crime.” 1 At the same...

It’s just been scientifically proven that ducks have abstract thinking. 1 The discovery neither alters nor surprises ducks, since they’ve known this fact, since they are ducks. The discovery just reveals that we, non-ducks, are deeply fascinated by sharing traits that are relevant to our idea of rationality with ducks. If taken really seriously, the discovery is a revolution, marking, in a very nice, duckish way, the impossibility of taking the premises of humanism and humanists seriously....

If you spot a “throbber,” you’ve probably got an issue with your hardware. These small digital animations, more commonly known as buffer icons, only appear when your internet connection or browser speed is too slow to manage the volume of incoming data. In the 1990s almost every webpage used to buffer before it loaded; the old Netscape throbber (depicting a meteor shower over a hilltop) was practically the unofficial logo of the World Wide Web for many years. These days you will only see a...

The 1990s were dominated by debates about postmodernism, one strand of which was concerned with the so called “aestheticization of the life world.” Wolfgang Welsch, for example, wrote in Grenzgänge der Ästhetik , “The facades get prettier, the shops more animated, the noses more perfect. But such aestheticization reaches deeper, it affects fundamental structures of reality as such.” 1 For aestheticization means “basically that the non-aesthetic is made aesthetic or is grasped as being...

"There are no depths. Appearance is the summary of phenomena."
—Joseph Brodsky
Life on Earth is a narrative written by the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The chemical design of DNA is uniform among every form of life, but its sequence is different between species and individuals. DNA sequences are comprised of millions of differentially combined chemical letters (A, T, C & G) and yield most of the current diversity of species, as well as offering an endless blueprint for the...

Per Frederick Kiesler, design is born from a crocodile—a reptile caged inside the architect’s genealogical table alongside a solitary piece of metal. 1 Were it not for the vertical line dividing the two figures, one could picture the crocodile snapping the hard rock with its open jaws and swallowing, slowly but steadily, the large mineral specimen. Design, Kiesler implies, is born by the omnivorous appetite of animal beings seeking to assimilate the most indigestible things, including...

1
I saw the white light through the monitor of my mobile phone—a burst of white light that spread from the upper-left corner of the frame the moment the surveillance camera at Istanbul’s Atatürk airport captured the detonation of the suicide bomb—and this fleeting white light meant that some people’s lives had been cruelly taken from them without any warning.
This was neither the first nor the last time a suicide bomber would strike against innocent people in a modern public space,...

The New Old Gentry
Housing is meant to make our lives more comfortable from the outside. Besides walls that protect us from hostile circumstances, we have equipped the interior with an accumulation of tools and devices. To be spoiled by all those belongings has only been followed by even more things. Digitalization marked a shift in the minimalism of interior design; while it was first about shrinking, smoothing, and hiding those tools and devices, 3D printing and the Cloud enable us to...

“Are we human?” 1 A possible way to answer this question is to ask someone who is not human. So let me ask a “replicant.” This, you may recall, was the name given to the nonhuman figures in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner (1982), adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 2 The replicant was a robot that understood humans well. A sophisticated type of android, it fulfilled a series of literary dreams and cinematic fantasies: the desire to “replicate”...

There is something elusive about the term “design.” English dictionaries tell us the word comes from French, French dictionaries point to an Italian origin ( disegno , drawing), but modern Italian uses the English word “design.” French and German have also adopted the English term, while Spanish prefers diseño . Most cultures, it seems, project the idea of design into the sphere of international English and the cool modernity it represents.
In these languages “design” has several...

One morning, while a man busied himself opening his shop, Design and Accident entered into a conversation.
Design proclaimed: “I have created humans; humans differ from others because of me; I shape their minds and lives. Their families, friends, gods, religions, organizations, communities and nations are me; their homes, schools, factories, temples, cities and graveyards are nothing but me; there is no human universe without me; I am what they eat, wear and think; I create sense in...

I
You burn me
—Sappho, addressing passion
A song from my childhood, by Fairuz, Lebanon’s most famous singer, goes like this:
I wish
You and I were in a house
A house the furthest house
Erased behind the frontiers of darkness and wind
And snow falling, wounding the surface of all things,
Making you lose your way, so that you would never leave,
And you would remain,
Next to me you would remain,
While a thousand season of jasmine would blossom, and...

I was thinking of a book, but I didn’t like that idea.
—Marcel Duchamp 1
Posthumous books are published, why not a posthumous show?
—Philippe Parreno 2
Can an exhibition be a productive medium for thinking through , and not just a kind of pedagogical illustration of extant ideas? Certainly there have been works of literature, art, and music with such magnificent ambitions, and intellectuals who have attempted to articulate the philosophy of, say, the novel,...

As of September 2016, “Brangelina” was no more.
That most super-famous of celebrity portmanteaus—Brad + Angelina—which began in 2005, during the pre-social media age, ended eleven years later, in a feverish hysteria of cruel/funny Twitter/Facebook memes. 1 This supercouple, who had surrendered their individual identities to become a clickbait-friendly brand (worth an alleged $400 million), were breaking apart. And there was nothing any of us could do about it. Some of us...

If I am not drowned or killed trying to escape in the next few days, I hope to write two books. I shall entitle them Apology for Survivors and Tribute to Malthus.
—Adolfo Bioy Casares 1
Addressing politics in the Anthropocene, Jodi Dean identifies three possible roles for humans: observers, victims, and survivors. 2 Her analysis of these differing human trajectories exists within a clear Darwinian perspective of the world. The division of humans into passive victims, active...

In 1936, the equation wasn’t yet common knowledge and it was still decades before you could look things up on a search engine. 1 If you forgot something or had a gap in your understanding, sometimes you still needed to “phone a friend.” The best and most efficient design for information retrieval still required you to know people who knew things. Isamu Noguchi wired his friend Buckminster Fuller, an admirer of Einstein, to ask if he knew it. 2
Fuller’s reply to Noguchi—a...

Man is alone, desperately scraping out the music of his own skeleton, without father, mother, family, love, god or society. And no living being to accompany him. And the skeleton is not of bone, but of skin, like a skin that walks.
—Antonin Artaud 1
“Black” and “white” signify their own arbitrariness, and are a deliberate way of maintaining and affirming a kind of colour-blindness. When I name myself or another as “black”, I mean “one whom others regard as “black”. I could not use...

Some twenty years ago, the effects of an expanding regime of design were starting to be felt in the field of contemporary art. Increasingly, designers seemed to use art contexts as platforms for non-pragmatic reflection and expression. Increasingly, design was also becoming a catalyst in so-called "social" art practices, artistic efforts to engineer or test drive new social and/or economic relations. In the work of collectives like Superflex or Atelier van Lieshout, for instance, design was...

When Aristophanes was summoned in Plato’s symposium to speak of eros ( έρως ), he reverted to the root of human nature, the bodily reality of three sexes: male, female and the vanished malefemale ( αρσενικοθήλυκο ). 1 The latter was the strongest and fastest of all, combining both male and female attributes. Its appearance was whole and round with four hands and legs, two faces, and a back on all sides. The creature was not erect and would never stand vertical to the earth. It did not...

The first and sometimes last thing an architect designs is himself. Andrea Palladio was born Andrea Di Petro della Gondola in 1508, and only became "Palladio" in 1538. The new name—concocted out of Pallas Athene , the goddess of wisdom and the name of a character in a play by Palladio’s patron, Gian Giorgio Trissino—designated Andrea as a master of languages, of both humanism and architecture. John Swan is the forgotten son of a mason, but also the moderately known architect John Soan, as...

Self-directed Exit Education
They called me a ‘snob,’ which, obviously, left me overjoyed. I was inventing culture for myself, and at the same time inventing a character and a personality.
—Didier Eribon 1
In Returning to Reims , a 2009 autosociographic account of class flight and proletarian self-hatred, French philosopher Didier Eribon, author of a well-known biography on Michel Foucault and several books on la question gay , emphasizes the role of autodidacticism...

Field Note Excerpt I: By Invitation Only
Harvard Medical School (Boston, Massachusetts, USA), May 10, 2016.
Anticipation was in the air. Old friends, new acquaintances, and profitable collaborations. “History is being made,” said one speaker after another. History and synthetic genomes.
I did not realize until sitting at the airport on my way to Boston that this was intended to be a “closed session.” The organizers asked participants not to contact any media outlets or...

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the period when the conceptual framework of the “state of nature” reshaped moral, legal and political philosophy —European forests, new technologies for extracting carbon traces from arctic ice reveal, were taken down at the fastest rate to date. 1 The great forests largely turned into cropland and fuel prior to wood’s replacement with coal as Europe’s main source of energy, and the colonial economy’s appetite for ships finished off the...

If we contemplate any natural object, especially any part of animated nature, fully and in all its bearings, we can arrive only at this conclusion: that there is design in the mechanical construction, benevolence shown in the living properties, and that good predominates: we shall perceive that the sensibilities of the body have a relation to the qualities of things external, and that delicacy of texture is a necessary consequence of this relation.
—Charles Bell 1
Scottish...

I’ve long thought that conventional understandings of geography were a little too “horizontal”. That geographical concepts such as production, uneven development, territory, scale, geopolitics and the like tended to be theorized on an assumed horizontal plane of human existence makes sense, because the vast majority of human activity does more-or-less conform to the relatively narrow vertical band on the earth’s surface that can support human life. But human infrastructures and activities...

This “space of Otherness” line of nonhomogeneity had then functioned to validate the socio-ontological line now drawn between rational, political Man (Prospero, the settler of European descent) and its irrational Human Others (the categories of Caliban [i.e. subordinated Indians and the enslaved Negroes])…
—Sylvia Wynter 1
In 2014 the San Francisco-based Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) requested the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to...

Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human being—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.
—Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees” 1
Humanitarianism is often posed as a “practice of humanity”: an ensemble of forms of care that protect a notionally universal “human.” But who or what is the humanitarian human? Might the humanitarian protection of humanity also involve a production...

The idea of self-design is a paradox. Or, to put it more accurately, the idea of self-design will be a paradox if the self involved is understood as either too unified or too heterogeneous. If you want the concept to work, you need to articulate the self into an agent capable of taking on the verb “to design,” a target for her labor, and a relatively coherent object that emerges at the end. Even so, paradox lingers. The self that emerges should merge back into the very agent who is doing the...

It is probably a mistake to elevate those attributes of the homo sapiens nervous system that long for the right answer, the unified field, the elementary particle, or the universal truth. These beliefs are present not only in formalized philosophies, religions and political regimes of the human, but at the heart of the human’s daily activities. Some cerebral constructs—the most immaterial and ephemeral of all the body’s inventions—ossify into cast-iron closed loops of logical thinking that...

The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects, but rather extends from carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. Our new publication, entitled Superhumanity, aims to probe the idea that we are and always have been continuously reshaped by the...

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